I know I have been remiss in my blog updates this spring... or lack thereof. I have been existing in a weird space of cognative dissonance where I am trying to make various interests and requirements match up in my head... I think that I am starting to get to a head-space that allows me to articulate these various struggles and elements - if not one that has aligned them...
I have been struggling first with what I want to do, with my life - no small question, no easy answer. Tangled up in this question is how grad school/a PhD might help, or hinder, me in doing whatever it is I am not sure I want to do. And two military aphorisms keep running through my head: Plans rarely survive the first engagement with the enemy; and it is unwise to switch drivers mid-charge - and who knows why terms of battle are the key to these thoughts. I don't really have a martial personality. And what do they mean to my situation - should I not plan at all? Clearly, the question of changing course midstream is not as occluded - and really I don't want to change course. I want to continue in academia. I like literature. I like talking about literature. I like teaching literature. And I love my program. But I need a job - a now job, and an after graduation job. And I don't want a job that interfers with my studies now, but if I don't get a job I may not be able to continue with my studies...
My plans - or really more hopes, at this stage - for scholarship are also somewhat dissonant. I love the work I am doing in the Medieval and Early Modern, and I also love the work I am doing in Popular Romance Studies. These are rather disparate tracks. bringing them together has been, and continues to be, a struggle. Add in my passionate interest in food, and you have a whole other level of complication... for both of the other aspects. Food is a wonderful vehicle for analysis, but not necessarily a unifying factor - in fact it is frequently splintering. Can I use it to look at the same things in the two different Studies? Am I just going to have to live in this bi-polar professional space? On a practical level, how marketable is any of it?
I feel like I am being tugged in all these different directions. So, I guess if anyone out there has suggestions on what to do with all this noise I wold appreciate hearing them.
